What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna

A SHORT COURSE IN FORGETTING CHEMISTRY 13
with living shadows. Monet’s texture strokes help that happen by
raising glints of light that sparkle randomly among the painted
stalks and leaves, confusing the eye and mimicking the hopeless
chaos of an actual field. In this detail, the raw canvas shows
through in a couple of places: one of them is just at the end of the
snaking blue mark, short of the Emerald Green. But what color
went down first? In the top half of the detail, it looks as if the light
Cerulean Blue might be underneath, and the other colors on top
of it—but on closer inspection, there is no uniform layer of
Cerulean Blue. It’s a mixture, already layered with overlapping
pigments. And in the lower half, it is hard to say if blue is on top
of white, or vice versa: they seem to be tumbling together at the
bottom.
The trick, then, which is much more than a simple trick, is to
lay down strokes that are different from one another, and to keep
over lapping and juxtaposing them until the entire surface begins
to resonate with a bewildering complexity. 4 The marks must not
be simple dabs, or shaped dashes, or any other namable form,
but they must mutate continuously, changing texture, outline,
smoothness, color, viscosity, brilliance, and intensity in each
moment. I have taught classes in the Art Institute of Chicago, in
which students try to copy paintings; the first student of mine
who set out to copy a Monet nearly gave up in frustration. Every
time she put her brush to her canvas she ended up with some
predictable pattern of marks. The first day, she tried to sketch in
a scene of the ocean, which Monet had painted in a light greenish
blue. She produced a white canvas, sprinkled with blue polka
dots. We examined the original from a few inches away, and we
saw the ocean was made of four colors: a deep purplish hue
signifying the depths of the ocean, a light Cobalt Blue reflecting
the sky, hints of Malachite Green, and Lead White foam for the
breaking waves. So she tried again, and made an awful Op Art
pattern of colored circles. We looked more closely at the original,
and saw that some of the marks were laid down almost dry, and
brushed hard against the canvas, and others were wetter, and set
down more lightly. She tried again, not wiping anything away,
but building up the paint, and it began to look a little better. But
then she had to stop working on the ocean, because the wet paint
was beginning to slur together into a single hue.
She went on like that for two months, letting portions dry
while she worked on other passages, exactly as I imagine Monet